New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the U.S. war with Iran in a podcast interview, saying the conflict has inflated costs in a city where prices were already high. Mamdani said the billions of dollars already spent on the war could instead be directed to working-class Americans across the country.

He said the ongoing military operation against Iran should be opposed on political, moral, and economic grounds. "While this war has exacerbated a cost of living crisis, that is a crisis that existed from even before the time I was running for mayor, and it's reflected in the fact that we are the most expensive city in the United States of America," he said.

The mayor invoked a lyric from the rapper Tupac to frame his argument. "I wish that the words of Tupac from the '90s weren't still prescient, but they continue to be true for too many, which is that 'we always have money for war and not to feed the poor,'" Mamdani said.

The U.S. government has spent an estimated $28 billion on the Iran war, which began as a joint military operation between the U.S. and Israel in late February. In a poll conducted last week before negotiations between senior U.S. and Iranian leaders in Pakistan collapsed, almost 60% of Americans said the war is going very or somewhat badly for the U.S. Those negotiations collapsed over the weekend.

Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, and global oil prices rose. Gas prices have increased across the United States during the conflict. On Thursday, the House of Representatives failed to pass a measure that would have required the president to remove U.S. military forces from hostilities in Iran, with the vote occurring mostly along party lines.

President Donald Trump dismissed calls to expand day care subsidies for families with young children, saying the government has to pay for the military instead. "It's not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things," Trump said. "They can do it on a state basis. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country."

Mamdani was elected in November after running a campaign focused on making New York City more affordable, and he has passed the 100-day mark in office. On the election trail, he vowed to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers to pay for campaign pledges, including making child care more affordable. In March, Mamdani and New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced a free child care program to serve up to 2,000 two-year-olds in New York City, with plans to expand it.